War & Peace Quote by A. J. P. Taylor

Taylor’s jab lands because it pretends to praise Lenin while quietly stripping him of prophetic glamour. “The first to discover” is delivered like a merit badge, then punctured by the timing: Lenin “discovered” capitalism’s “inevitable” war-making only once the war had already arrived. The scare quotes around “inevitably” do the real work. Taylor is ridiculing the Marxist habit of retrofitting history with laws that look eerily accurate after the fact.

The subtext is methodological: beware theories that treat catastrophe as confirmation. If you announce that capitalism must produce war, and then point to 1914, you’re not predicting; you’re labeling. Taylor’s “Of course he was right” twists the knife. Lenin is “right” in the cheapest possible sense, because the sample set is rigged: “every great state was capitalist in 1914.” When all major powers share the same economic system, any major-power war can be pinned on that system. It’s a wry comment on causation versus correlation, disguised as a historical aside.

Context matters. Writing in the shadow of two world wars and amid Cold War ideological trench warfare, Taylor loved puncturing grand, self-serious narratives. Here he targets not just Lenin, but the broader temptation to treat history as a courtroom where outcomes are evidence of preexisting guilt. The line is vintage Taylor: brisk, mischievous, and devastatingly empirical. He doesn’t deny that capitalism and imperial competition mattered; he’s warning that “inevitability” is often just hindsight dressed up as science.